Archive for February, 2013

Internet Explorer 10 is available worldwide in 95 languages for download today and brings the same leading standards support, with improved performance, security, privacy, reliability that consumers enjoy on Windows 8, to Windows 7 customers.

IE10 delivers the best performance for real world Web sites on your Windows device. As with Windows 8, IE10 on Windows 7 improves performance across the board with faster page loading, faster interactivity, and faster JavaScript performance, while reducing CPU usage and improving battery life on mobile PCs. IE loads real world pages up to 20% faster in top sites for news, social, search, ecommerce, and more.

You can experience IE10’s leading performance first hand with demos on the IE Test Drive site with examples of hardware accelerated rendering, interactivity, touch, and real world site patterns. Minesweeper is a new test drive demo that is both a full featured HTML5 game and also lets you measure your browser’s performance.

For developers, IE10 brings increased support for modern Web standards powered by hardware acceleration to enable a new class of compelling applications and fast and fluid Web browsing. IE10 adds support for over 30 new modern Web standards beyond IE9, for a 60% increase. These new supported standards in IE10 include many of the latest HTML5, CSS3, DOM, Web Performance, and Web Application specifications across important aspects of Web development including:

Microsoft Office 365 is now an easier way to set and to run a full network for small and medium-sized businesses. The new edition is:

easier to set up,

easier to administer

easier to use,

more flexible

friendlier to mobile devices

capable,of working with additions in Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Lync 2013,

The ability to switch on mail, file sharing, Web/intranet, messaging, and live meetings without standing up servers and SANs will be enticing to companies eager to save time and money

The’s still plenty of room for improvement andmpanies who think implementing Office 365 will eliminate the need for IT staff (and IT pros who think it will mean more hours in the day for World of Warcraft) are going to be disappointed. Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync may be running in Microsoft’s cloud, but thoseill require attention from knowledgeable hands.

Different Office 365 plans are available, and Microsoft addedwo more to the mix: the Small Business Premium and the Midsize Business. These plans come with the Microsoft Office 2013 suite on a subscription basis, including the ability for each user to install the software on five devices (PCs or Macs but for other users its a price per device.). Should you need to edit a document on some other device, such as an iPad, you can do so with Office Web Apps, which support all the latest browsers and are good enough for light work. Even better, if you can borrow someone else’s PC, you can stream the Office 2013 applications from the cloud for temporary use. Note that users get the same features using the streaming Office apps or the on-premises installations.

New features to highlight include::

The People feature (basically a beefed-up contact database)

The Newsfeed that lets users combine all their online resources, such as websites they like, blogs they read, RSS feeds, and status updates from other users.

A new Sites feature combines all of a user’s individual and team SharePoint sites.

Finally there’s SkyDrive, which allots varying amounts of online storage for each user depending on how much you want to pay, with geo-redundant backup thrown in for free.

Users also have one-click access to the Office Store, for new Office-certified apps (think add-ons).

Of course admins can control access to this.

Note however a change in license policy that reflects the move to the cloud, and the move towards a BYOD world.

There is no purchasable physical, removable media – when you buy an Office 365 subscription or one of the single user copies of Office 2013, you will receive a product key code.

You will have to use your browser to navigate to office.com/setup and download the actual applications.

A single user copy of Office 2013 is licensed to a single machine, not to a single user. Officially: The software license is permanently assigned to the device on which the software is initially activated. That device is the “licensed device.” In the event of an under warranty failure, you can ask Microsoft to transfer the license

The pricing of Office 2013 is favourably biased towards Office 365with full office professioanl at $399.99 per user per annum.

Switching to a subscription model requires a major shift in perspective when it comes to how we purchase and use our software, but that does not automatically make it a bad optiont. This change is a reflection of the living in a networked, always on, cloud-based, software as a service world and even Luddites like me are going to have to come to terms with it – sooner or later.

A procession of color as far an eye can see, a garden of Eden, DUBAI’s MIRACLE GARDEN a wonder in desert. This park was launched on Valentine’s Day and it is created by Al ain based landscaping and agricultural company Akar, the creators of Al Ain paradise. Flowers are planted in different shapes: heart, star, pyramids, arches, domes, flower clad vintage and designer cars, unique ceiling gardening, water springs and flower towers.

With a floral perimeter wall around it and more than 45 million flowers of the garden it is racing for Guinness record.

This garden is situated at Dubai land near Arabia Ranches Bridge by the side of Emirates road towards Jabel Ali on the Arjan exit. Take the UmmSuqeim Rd from Emirates mall , cross the Al Khail Rd and pass Dubiotech and you wil find it on the right just before the main roundabout with the Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Rd

Budget Planning is particularly suited to organizations with formal and structured budgeting processes. Budget Planning allows for multiple budgeting processes to be active at the same time to allow for maximum flexibility. Use Budget Planning to :

Let us demonstrate a few of the great reports you can get from Management Reporter in relation to budgets.

Posting layers: In the latest release of Reporter, data can by restricted by the operations, tax and current posting layers from Microsoft Dynamics AX.

When a report is generated in Management Reporter, quick links are now dynamically created to let you jump to key areas of a report in the web viewer. This allows users to do a quick scan of the report to see if any data jumps out at them before drilling into details

Availability of translated Application User Help on TechNet in 16 languages for R2 (95% complete ) more to come this month.

The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Help system combines many sources into a single user-assistance portal. A Help server on your local network provides Help from Microsoft, and may also include customized Help created by a partner or customer for application users. In addition, Microsoft hosts the latest help for application users, system administrators, and software developers on the web. System administrators can also download and install the latest Help updates from Microsoft from CustomerSource.

In the Help system, you can use the table of contents or search to navigate.

A shift in IT is the consumerization-of-IT. With the advent of the iPhone and other modern mobile devices, most businesses find employees have ther own mobiles but incealsingky these are smart phones and tablets an dicnreasnkgy get used for work purposes. Exponential growth success on the mobile front puts pressure on IT to allow other employee-driven technologies, such as PCs, cloud services, desktop apps, and social media

Wi-Fi access is available at most major company one might walk into. These companies might not realize it, but if they grant Internet access to any and all comers, then they’ve implemented a BYOD policy whether they know it or not. With an influx of devices carried by vendors, salespeople, trainers, temporary workers, field service technicians and employees, how should a company approach its network’s permission policy in regards to devices it might not be able to control?

A surprisingly small percentage of companies have implemented explicit bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies. An estimated 80% of enterprises lack a mobile device management (MDM) system to protect corporate assets on employee-owned devices. With companies liable for mishandled sensitive information, a BYOD strategy is a necessity.

The three tier model is a convenient way to explain how a distributed IT system works but this simple explanation is not always reality. Data is not restricted to one set of servers — it was scattered across all of the clients, servers, desktops of the enterprise. And that complexity is greater now with BYOD, and cloud based solutions In enterprise applications in a three-tier architecture,

The customers ran thick clients on their desktops and connected with a front-end presentation tier.

The business logic and processing were codified in the middle tier.

The data sources were internal, kept away from the customers in the back-end tier.

In the modern IT world, enterprise data is scattered around the organization’s network and elsewhere. The BYOD trend means require back up,. on business desktops, personal laptops, business phones and personal tablets, and in virtual environments etc. The traditional back up approach of of enterprise systems is to install agents to copy data and to forward it to a central backup service. Different types of agents are required for different types of applications – for instance, a virtual server system may run agents for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, or Citrix XenServer. A database system may have agents for Microsoft SQLServer, IBM DB,2 or Oracle. Managing a fleet of agents is complex and expensive. Backup is a means to an end. What’s important is access to data when you need it most. Running a restore test is not the most exciting job in the world and its also not the easiest with mobile clients.

There are other BYOD challenges. If your enterprise deploys devices that integrate with your existing authentication infrastructure, then for BYOD you need an alternate route of authentication for a new application. Users don’t want to remember numerous passwords they are used to single sign on. So authenticate against the enterprise’s AD system. It makes your users and IT staff happy. One of the really nice things about working in an enterprise environment is that you can almost always count on Active Directory and Group Policy being there. Group Policy in particular is fantastic because it lets the system administrators centralize settings and configuration. Your application needs to be added to the “Trusted Sites” in order to work fine? No problem, push it through Group Policy. Require an obscure registry setting to be changed? Group Policy to the rescue! Is there an OS feature that must be installed for the application to work? Group Policy does that too. With BYOD, your application must work without any kind of centralized configuration or control, which means that end users need to be able to configure it on their own. Maybe this means that you leverage DNS (like Exchange does) to help point users to a central configuration, or perhaps you use another configuration server scenario. Can you count on Group Policy and Active Directory for management and configuration with BYOD?. That is why we add AD synchronisation to SOTI mobile device management.

Android phones, iPhone, iPads and other smart devices are all about apps. Thousands of new apps for these platforms are introduced every day, including productivity-boosting apps that are being adopted by businesses. Apps can include malicious components designed to introduce viruses or steal data. While app stores have various evaluation criteria, it is risky to assume that all apps are safe for all enterprise environments. Even if a guest device doesn’t have direct access to corporate file servers or other resources, there may still be nothing preventing it from launching denial-of-service attacks or other malicious behavior

Managing applications relates to employee efficiency. “Angry Birds” and other seemingly harmless game apps can steal hours that rapidly multiply with the proliferation of BYOD. Wha tf the app is on an emeployee evice but he uses the device for work purposes e.g checking mails at an airport? or preparing a quote and he then connects to your network to transfer files?

BYOD policies should include restrictions on the types of apps that can reside on employee-owned phones that are used to access corporate resources such as e-mail and calendars

Every smart device offers password protection capabilities, but unless IT is overseeing the passwords, many BYOD users will take the easy route and opt out of password controls. Yet for comaopny moble devices the risk of loss of data due to a stolen or misplaced device is incresed so password protection is essential.

For enterprise development of new applications you knew screen sizes used by the company. With BYOD, an application must adapt to different screen sizes adroitly, which is a bit of work for a native mobile application if you want it to look really nice instead of counting on the OS scaling it. With Web applications, that is a lot easier. With traditional enterprise applications, we got used to rolling out something and having the users get trained on it. The training worked because everyone had the same experience. BYOD users expect to install an app or point to a URL and start working. And even when there are opportunities to train, users will have different experiences because they won’t all be using the same device. Your applications must be usable without formal training, and have self-contained help and documentation and tutorials.

Lots of companies set up barriers to VPN like physical tokens and third-party applications. These setups are sold with the promise of increased management and reduced headaches, but in a world of BYOD, they shut most devices out of the VPN entirely, meaning that everything needs to run over the public Internet. You should be prepared for your application to run over the public Internet too, unless it is something that is entirely useless off-premises.

Expect all traffic to be HTTP (will IT staff open a different port just for your application/), and plan how to leverage the device’s built-in email capabilities if you need to send email.

An application absolutely must be secure. This means HTTPS for anything but the most innocent of traffic. Consider encrypting sensitive data too to defend against man-in-the-middle attacks and snooping when the user is on public Wi-Fi. Sensitive data stored on the device should be encrypted. Treat data from the device like you would treat data from a public-facing Web site, and protect against SQL injections, cross-site-scripting, and other similar attacks.

Cost is also a factor. Cellular networks discriminate by the minute and megabyte and the discrimination is worse when roaming or going off net to communicate with a different carrier. Enterprises get big benefits from going to a single carrier – in plan calls, large discounts and support. All these advantages disappear if employees’ mobile contracts fragment into individual tariffs reclaimed through expenses

If employees use their own devices, what safeguards does the organisation have for the sensitive data that might end up on that personal hardware and what can it do to ensure that personal device choices will support all the business apps that staff need to do their job? Which users will be trusted with what data and/or resources and in what circumstances. The issues are complex when personal mobile devices are involved because such devices are not in the organization’s direct control. A trusted user carrying sensitive documents on an iPad might unknowingly disable company-mandated encryption, exposing the company in the event of loss or theft

Using the same end-point protection software on employee-owned devices that is used on corporate hardware is fraught with issues. For example, what happens when a remote lock and wipe destroys, say, personal photos?

Just as many security and compliance issues were caused by the early adoption of instant messaging. Now a similar risk comes from employee use of public social media for sharing business information.Who is moderateing t he tweets, facebook posts instagrams and blogs? Individuals have grown accustomed to using IT online, but are now increasingly taking advantage of access on their mobile devices. Sharing information is easier,but increases the risks to the organisation.

Thereare productivity and motivation gains when employees can use their favoured devices and tools and that’s why they fight to keep Excel when ERP is introduced!

However, Team Foundation Server (TFS) isn’t just source control, it’s a whole bug tracking, change management, application lifecycle management (ALM) suite. Source control is one pluggable piece. On the other hand, Git isn’t just source control either. Git has become effectively FTP for code. plan is that in a future release Git will come baked in to all editions of Visual Studio – including Express

Synergy is a well established, solution provider across the Middle East region.
Synergy has a strong presence in several key verticals; Manufacturing, Construction, Hospitality Insurance, Financial Services, Government. Media, Oil and Gas, Distribution.
Synergy is particularly well known as a Gold Partner of both Infor Sunsystems, and Microsoft Dynamics Ax and for its implementation expertise and exceptional support. It is based centrally in Dubai in the Karama district since it was registered in 1991, and occupies a 7,000 sq ft office with around 80 full time employees.